Pastor Kimberly Jones of Limitless Church in Fayetteville, Georgia, known to many as “Real Talk Kim,” said her divorce almost let hatred lead her away from God’s purpose for her life. Now, she’s empowering others to get up and move forward as they work through the issues that keep them stuck.
Jones, a pastor’s daughter who grew up with a learning disability, thought she would never recover after her first divorce at 36. She was financially destitute with two sons, depressed, and had to move back in with he parents. Years later, after another failed marriage, she started the self-evaluation process, seeking God daily and finding the purpose in her pain. During that process, Jones wrote her new book, You Gotta Get Up: Grab Hold of Your Life After Being Knocked Down, Held Back, and Left Out.
Jones said she’s come out on the other side and hopes to empower others to do the same. In a recent interview with The Christian Post, Jones said, “I walked through a divorce in 2006 after an 18-year marriage, and he was my God. In the religion I was raised in, if you get divorced, you’re going to hell on a slide and slide. It was not even heard of in 2006 in the church; now it’s rampant.” She continued, “I found myself humiliated. I found myself with two sons, Lincoln and Morgan. They were 7 and 9. No one understood what I was walking through because nobody in my family had walked through a divorce. I felt like a mockery to my father, who was in ministry.”
Jones said she and the father of her sons were like the “Barbie and Ken of the church,” with the perfect life as they led as worship pastors. After he left, she didn’t know how she would recover. She recalled, “I laid in my bed for the first year just mad at God because why couldn’t he heal my marriage? I had to move back in with my mom and dad because I lost everything. In that process, after a year of laying in my bed feeling sorry for myself, one day, I remember praying and saying, ‘God, take this pain away from me. If you’re not going to heal my marriage, take the pain away. And I promise you, probably the first time in my life, I felt this still small voice inside of me, and He said, ‘I can’t take it away, you got to get up and walk away from it.”
Hearing God’s voice was the beginning of Jones’ healing. She started getting into the Word of God to renew her mind, and by age 38, she says she was “breaking soul ties” and “breaking generational curses” off her life. “Just me and God. It was no conference. Nobody was laying hands on me from that point,” she added. Jones preached her first sermon at age 41 and went into full-time ministry after one of her videos went viral on social media. Now the senior pastor at Limitless Church, she has seen how, time and time again, God has encouraged her to get up.
Her book, You Gotta Get Up, features declarations, prayers and tools from Scripture and Jones’ firsthand experiences with getting up and going forth. For anyone stuck, the 50-year-old preacher advised practicing spiritual disciplines. Today, both of Jones’ sons work with her in ministry despite their complicated childhood. She also encourages people not to let bitterness keep them from doing what God made them do. She also cautioned individuals not to allow labels assigned to them to become their identity.